The Maslow Effect

Fanaticism requires the endless outpouring of propaganda.

Photos courtesy: Wikipedia

(CALGARY, Alberta) - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, goes the old saying. So, it turns out, are social truths. I’m here today to explain.

A psychiatrist is testing a patient. He shows him the first of the ten Rorschach inkblots and asks him to describe what he sees. The man volunteers a detailed description of sex between a man a woman. With the second inkblot, he describes a graphic sex scene between two men. Men, women, animals—it was the same kind of response for the remaining eight.

The psychiatrist leans back and says—you seem to be very obsessed with sex.

What do you mean? the patient replied. You’re the one with all the dirty pictures.

Everyone has heard of Sigmund Freud. On the other hand, Abraham Maslow is almost unknown, although he was one of the founders of the school of humanist psychology, which initiated the self-help movement in society.

But that’s not why I bring him up. In 1966 he said: “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” This has become something of a folk saying, reflecting a significant social truth.

Replace the word “hammer” with the word “worldview”. And consider another common expression that “facts speak for themselves”. This is not true, at all. If facts were obvious, then we would have virtually no disputes between people.

Take a glass filled with water to its midpoint. The level of the water is an indisputable fact. But what does it say? Some people see the glass as half-full, others as half-empty. The fact does not speak for itself. Facts require interpretation through the mental prism I call the Maslow Effect.

Abraham Maslow

The state of the glass of water is, to each person, an extension of the mental hammer they carry around in their heads, the “hammer” being the set of beliefs they have about the world and with which they measure the world around them.

Here are some examples of the Maslow Effect in physics.

In 1897 J. J. Thomson discovered the electron. About the same time, however, the same experiment was done by Walter Kaufmann. The main difference between their experiments was that Kaufmann’s was better, yielding a ratio of the electron’s charge and mass that today we know was more accurate than Thomson’s.

But Kaufmann is not listed as a discoverer of the electron, because he did not think he had discovered a new particle. Kaufmann was a positivist (believer in only what could be detected with the five senses) and did not believe that physicists should speculate about things they could not observe.

So he did not report that he had discovered a new kind of particle, but only that whatever flowed in a cathode ray tube carried a certain ratio of electric charge to mass.

In 1905 the French mathematician Henri Poincaré independently discovered the same space-time transformations as Einstein. But, to Poincaré they were merely mathematical concepts , with no physical significance. Einstein, on the other hand, took the physics seriously and developed the Special Theory of Relativity which, as a result, is credited to him alone.

In 1910, after atomism had been widely accepted, Ernst Mach wrote to Max Planck that “ if belief in the reality of atoms is so crucial, then I renounce the physical way of thinking. I will not be a professional physicist, and I hand back my scientific reputation .” Planck didn’t believe in atoms, either, and invented his own convoluted theory to assure himself that they did not exist.

On Nov 6, 1919 there was a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London and the Astronomer Royal announced that Einstein’s theory had been verified. J. J. Thomson said that relativity had now to be reckoned with and that our conceptions of the fabric of the universe must be fundamentally altered. At this point the eminent astronomer Sir Oliver Lodge rose, and walked out of the meeting. He could not accept the new science.

These were all men who acted out of a scientific orientation grounded in their individual psychology. Thomson was willing to speculate, Kaufmann was not. Mach, Planck and Lodge could not adjust to a potentially new reality. Perhaps the example par excellence is the 19th-century scientist H. L. F. von Helmholtz.

When asked about the possibility of telepathy, he said: “Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, would lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independent of the recognized channels of sense.”

Even Albert Einstein, who single-handedly initiated the 20th century revolution in physics, and whose theories co-founded quantum physics, could not to his dying day accept what quantum physics said about the world.

Physicist Heinz Pagels wrote: "Why did Einstein reject the interpretation of the new quantum physics-when most of his fellow scientists accepted it? Any answer to this question cannot be simple. Einstein's rejection reflects not just his rational choice but also the roots of his personality and character formed during his childhood in Germany. By examining his childhood we find clues to his later persistent adherence to the classical world view."

The Maslow Effect in the everyday world

Those men were all professional scientists, trained over decades to think critically about the world, yet they were unable to overcome what amounted to, in the final analysis, their personal prejudices.

Our personal prejudices, whether we are trained in quantum mechanics or auto mechanics, are based on the same psychological principles—the assumptions about the world that we carry around in our heads—usually unconsciously. This is nowhere more evident than in the world of politics.

Think of taxes. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” Conversely, Stephen Harper, conservative Prime Minister of Canada and trained as an economist said last July: “You know, there's two schools in economics on [taxes]. One is that there are some good taxes and the other is that no taxes are good taxes. I'm in the latter category. I don't believe that any taxes are good taxes.”

There we have a fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals. The difference comes down to an opinion, rooted in the childhoods, personalities, and life experiences of each person.

Obama: There are individuals who apparently sincerely (if wrong-headedly) believe that Obama is a Muslim. Others, sometimes the same people, believe that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Like Helmholtz on telepathy, these are people whose minds cannot be changed no matter how much evidence is presented.

Another aspect of the Maslow Effect is values. There are those who believe that their political opponents are bad people and conversely, the people who agree with their own political position are, by definition, good people.

The Maslow Effect in society

American society is polarized in the extreme—Canada not so much. The Maslow Effect is the source of that polarization. People’s beliefs are fundamentally based on emotional assumptions—none of which are absolutely verifiable or provable. As a result, there can be no resolution. I say “to-may-to”, you say “to-mah-to”.

The only direction for progress I see is for moderate leaders to actually lead. Such people need to demonstrate to their followers, that there is no absolute position to hang on to. Society is about cooperation and working together. But, it’s the fanatics who are leading things right now.

And as psychoanalyst M. Esther Harding said: “We do not fight a man to uphold a certainty, but only to force him to accept our belief, our conviction, of the truth.”

In every case it’s about unconscious attitudes. As psychologist Robert Johnson describes it: "Fanaticism always indicates unconscious uncertainty not yet registering in consciousness."

More than half a century ago philosopher Eric Hoffer described the fanatic in The True Believer:

“The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources—out of his rejected self—but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength.

Though his single-minded dedication is a holding on for dear life, he easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings. And he is ready to sacrifice his life to demonstrate to himself and others that such indeed is his role. He sacrifices his life to prove his worth.”

Fanaticism requires the endless outpouring of propaganda. In the end, said philosopher Aldous Huxley, the function of propaganda is to enable people to do in cold blood, things that they could otherwise do only in the heat of passion. So, in America today, there are Red States and Blue States. In Canada we have Alberta, and everyone else.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue, although a lot of his views could be described as left-wing. He understands that who he is, is largely defined by where he came from. The focus for Daniel’s writing came in 1972. After a trip to Europe he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Alberta, and Calgary in particular, was extremely conservative Bible Belt country, more like Houston than any other Canadian city (a direct influence of the oil industry). Two successive Premiers of the province, from 1935 to 1971, had been Baptist evangelicals with their own weekly Sunday radio program—Back to the Bible Hour, while in office. In Alberta everything was distorted by religion.

Although he had published a few pieces (unpaid) in the local daily, the Calgary Herald, it was not until 1975 that he could actually make a living from journalism when, from 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman (1979-1993), Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting with the CBC. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com